here is within the human heart, I believe, a quality of intelligence that has been known to surpass that attributed to the human mind. The idea is one Muhammad Ali might have appreciated because in director Clare Lewins’ ten-star film documentary, I Am Ali, the fighter shares these words: “Man judges man’s actions. God judges man’s heart.”

When tapped and cultivated, or made a naturally dominant trait of an individual’s personality, the heart’s intelligence radiates a wise benevolence capable of assuming different powerful forms.

As fellow heavyweight champion and Christian minister George Foreman testified:

“Sometimes people come to me and say, ‘What do you think? Was Muhammad Ali the world’s greatest boxer?’ And I feel almost insulted because boxing was just something he did. I mean that’s no way to define Muhammad Ali. He was one of the greatest men to ever appear on the scene of the earth” (from I Am Ali, 2014).

Poster for the definitive 2014 biographical film on Muhammad Ali: "I Am Ali."

When the radiance of the heart emanated through the person of Muhammad Ali (1942-2016) he could easily, at different times, be defined in one of at least 10 different ways:

As a brash cosmic humorist

An ancient warrior recalled to a 20th-century battle

A poet charmed by the music of prophecy

Intrigued philosopher

Political conscience of an era

Passionate educator

Astonished lover

Devoted patriarch

Servant leader

Slightly mad holy-man

He could also, just to break the established rule and take things even further just as he might, be described as an enigmatically inspiring presence in a painfully turbulent world during sadly perilous times. The champion boxer emerged during the 1960s and 1970s to make everything else that he was––and what so many of us now have the luxury of claiming to be in this 21st-century world–– possible.

Of Saints and Athletes

On the iconic and controversial April 1968 cover of Esquire Magazine, the devout Muslim Ali duplicated the famous image of the Christian Saint Sebastian. Shot through with arrows for converting people to Christianity while enlisted as a Roman soldier, Sebastian (c. 256–c. 288 AD) was reportedly left for dead but miraculously recovered and confronted his would-be executioner. He was then then bludgeoned to death and in time adopted as a spiritual protector to call upon during plagues, and as a patron saint of warriors, individuals desiring a saintly death, and athletes.

As in the classic portraits of the martyred Saint Sebastian, the image of Muhammad Ali on the cover of Esquire shows him shot through with six bloody arrows. During the photo shoot, Ali identified the arrows as symbols of political figures whom he felt had positioned themselves to be his his “tormentors”: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), Vietnam War Commanding Army General William Westmoreland (1941-2005), U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009), U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk (1909-1994), political consultant Clark Clifford (1906-1998), and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978).

The specific names given the arrows could just as easily (or almost anyway) have been exchanged for the various social injustices which the garrulous gadfly witnessed and protested against: relentless racism, poverty, corporate colonialism, unnecessary war, class discrimination, and unequal education. The names could also have been switched out for any number of others who felt more threatened than charmed by the great man’s uncanny charisma.

A Curative Force of Genuine Love

It takes an oversized personality like his to absorb and survive the kind of social and political poisons designed precisely to destroy men such as Muhammad Ali.

It takes the most exceptional of hearts occupied by the rarest of souls to transform those toxins into a curative force of genuine love, one capable of healing and empowering multitudes just by being its beautiful shining courageous self.